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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
So you wound up writing a historical novel after all?
Yes! It was only months before, but yeah. I allowed myself one bit of slyness. Right at the end of the row they make a bet about what the outcome of the invasion will be. I already knew they were both right. Perowne predicts that there will be 200 papers free to publish in Iraq, and there are. And, as Daisy predicted, the occupation is a bloody mess. It would be perfectly possible for Perowne to voice much the same argument now, saying you have to salute the bravery of the Shiite community in voting and their tolerance in writing the Sunnis into the government, and we now see the true, brutal face of the insurgency. And Daisy would say, but there are 100,000 people dead and how can you possibly justify that? It's not settled.
Do you still feel as ambivalent about the war?
Well, it sounds pathetic, but I rather do. We can't know what would have happened if we'd left Saddam in place. He might have just exhausted himself as a tyrant or, worst case, his horrible sons were ready to take over. He could have lived another 15 years and gotten nastier and more paranoid with age.
Some of the antiwar arguments have been exploded. If the U.S. only wanted lots of oil, think of the oil futures it could have bought for the price of invading Iraq. All the world's oil for the next 50 years for the $280 billion spent. But I do think the body count is a very dark side of the argument. So yes, sometimes I'm impressed and sometimes I'm just irritated by people who know their minds completely about this. I'm glad I'm a novelist.
In Britain, though, people really expect novelists to have public opinions on that sort of thing.
Yes, ever since a pamphlet came out called "Novelists Take Sides." Every time there's some shoot-up somewhere, someone writes to you, and then the novelists all send in something that says, "This despicable, etc." What's it all about? It's certainly not about the Iraqi people.
You feel there's some other motive?
Oh, I don't want to impugn very interested people who knew their minds and spoke it, but it's a bit like Hollywood actresses saying things. What's that all about?
We don't necessarily know that all Hollywood actresses don't know what they're talking about.
No, no, I'm saying it has a sort of luvvie quality to it. Is that a word you don't have here? It's a rather unfair press name for actors, men as well as women, who take stands on things. Because actors are always [mimes a phony hug and air kiss].
So it's an empty gesture?
Yes. So, writers as luvvies. I don't know. I'm being more cynical about this than I really feel. No, it's quite right that writers should speak out, but it's so routine now, on every issue. Sometime silence is better.
You have a moment where Perowne is looking at the march and sees the signs reading "Not in Our Name" and there's a riff on that. What about that slogan bothers you?
I gave him my response to the banner that I loathed the most. It has an icky quality of me-too-ism and consumer self-importance.
To play devil's advocate, I'll say that probably those people were saying, "This is a democracy and you say you're doing this in our name, and we just want to make it clear that we don't endorse it."
Well, you don't agree, but that's different. If you live in a democracy, even if the president is not the president you voted for, it is in your name. The logic of "Not in Our Name" would be, "I dissent from the democratic principle." Like it or not, the contract you're in as a democrat is that even if you're on the losing side, you give your assent. As long as you think the vote is fair -- and that, of course, is another matter.
Why does that slogan make you think of consumerism?
You know how a billboard, with 50,000 cars going by, will say, "The perfume for you" or something like that? What is the grammatical nature of that "you"? It carries a quality of the lonely crowd. It's sad. You're supposed to be heartened by the sense that you're important to the corporation because you're a consumer. So you're fussy and picky and you like this bit of government and you hate that bit. You have Diet Coke and you have Triple Mac. But that's not the deal. You've got a government you loathe, and that's your perfect right, to loathe it and protest it, absolutely. You can't opt out. You're in the social contract.
It's a tricky distinction.
And I'm not sure how far I'm prepared to defend Henry Perowne on this. We've got -- and I know you've got this here -- public outpourings of grief about the deaths of people no one's met. We call it the "damp teddy syndrome." A little girl is abducted by some madman and it's all over the tabloids: Will she be found? Within days there are giant mounds of teddy bears. Spilling out onto the pavement, two tons of teddies. It rains, the teddies are there, soaked. People are in a sort of hatefest about the pedophile, they're sobbing. But it's not their child, they've never met this child, but there's a great storm of public emotion.
It's a lot like the way people have ranted and wept on and on about Terri Schiavo, calling her "Terri," when they don't know her and have never even seen her in person. It a kind of artificial intimacy
We've come to live in this age of confusion between public and private emotions. People feel they know this person. And you're entitled to sob even though it's not your life. Then there come the silences. Will there be a two-minute silence for Terri and will you dare to walk across this hotel lobby when everyone else is tearfully standing erect? Are you going to wear a yellow ribbon for Terri? We've entered this absurd world.
Yet Perowne does partake of that world. Because his personal life is so content, he becomes very caught up in world events. Yet at one point he asks what good it really does for him to lie around on the sofa all day Sunday reading newspapers and opinion pieces. He feels like he's participating but he's really just reading the paper.
Yes, it's a feeling that I've had sometimes, a sense that I'm actually involved. I'm lying there for hours in drifts of newspapers. It's almost as if I'm chief of staff with a head full of gunships and alliances. Then I realize that I'm just another punter buying a newspaper and my head is filled with other people's thoughts.
